‘Alligator Alcatraz' showcases Trump's surreal brand of stylized cruelty

The Guardian

2 days ago

The concentration camp seems to have been erected largely for the sake of a photoshoot. Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis – eager to rehabilitate his reputation among the Maga right in the wake of his humiliating and disastrous 2024 presidential run – has been among the most eager foot soldiers of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. He has dedicated funding to capturing migrants and holding them at facilities like the Krome detention center in Miami, where dramatic overcrowding, the absence of air conditioning, rapidly spreading disease, and a shortage of food, sanitation, and medical care have contributed to an outcry among immigrants imprisoned there and the deaths of multiple detainees, including a 29-year-old man from Honduras, a 44-year-old man from Ukraine and a 75-year-old Cuban national who had lived in the United States since his teens.
For his efforts, DeSantis has received praise from Donald Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. This kind of abuse of immigrants – rounding them up, cramming them into detention centers that are little more than cages, and letting them die there of heat, illness or neglect – is exactly the kind of policy that aligns with the Trump administration's aims.
And so it should not be surprising that the initial proposal for the so-called 'Alligator Alcatraz' – a small tent city on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades that has been erected as a concentration camp for immigrants captured by Trump's forces – came from within the DeSantis administration.
The camp was first proposed in a video posted to X by Florida's DeSantis-appointed Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier. Uthmeier, who has mimicked Trump officials in ignoring judicial orders in order to carry out deportations, coined a name for his proposed camp that seemed especially designed to appeal to Trump's fantasies of high-drama, cinematic domination of his enemies. Trump has reportedly mused both about creating a moat filled with alligators along the Mexico border and about reviving Alcatraz, the former federal island prison in the San Francisco Bay which has been the subject of action movies, including a 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood and a 1996 Sean Connery vehicle, which the president has probably seen playing on cable television. In the video, Uthmeier walks along a rural airstrip, presumably the one he had earmarked as the camp site, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. He can be heard in a voiceover saying that immigrants, whose illegal entry into the United States is a civil violation and who often have not been convicted of any crime, will not be able to escape the facility without encountering alligators and pythons in the Florida wilderness. In another shot, a helicopter sits on the asphalt as rock music plays.
Donald Trump apparently liked what he saw, because the camp was erected over the course of mere days, and Trump toured the facility on 1 July, standing in a red hat that read 'GULF OF AMERICA' before a series of chain-link cages filled with rows of bunk beds. The facility received its first prisoners the next day. Almost immediately, DeSantis's team began selling merchandise for the facility, for Trump supporters who want to advertise their enthusiasm for mass deportation.
It has long been a feature of Trump's regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement's style of masculinity. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is the kind of place the hero would have to escape from in a television show, or in a level of a video game, and its stylized cruelty is supposed to seem hyperreal, even uncanny. Perhaps this sense of scripted unreality surrounding what is in fact a concentration camp is supposed to help Trump's supporters and the rest of the American people partake in the pleasures of domination while avoiding the recognition that the horror and pain they are inflicting is real.
But it is real. The camp has been open, now, for just over a week, and already one prisoner has been hospitalized, reportedly as a result of the camp's inhumane conditions. According to news reports, many of the men there were not permitted to shower for days. Broken air conditioning left men alternately freezing and sweltering in the heat. Detainees report that they are only being fed one meal a day, and that the food has been infested with maggots. There is no secure line by which the prisoners – who, again, are being detained on civil, not criminal, violations – can speak to their lawyers without being monitored. Toilets don't flush, and the facility is infested with bugs. It is not clear that the concentration camp, housed in the low-elevation swamps of south Florida, can withstand the rains and winds that are typical of the east coast's summer hurricane season. It has already flooded.
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If the immigrants are kept in these conditions, more of them will die. They will die of heat, disease and exposure; they will die when heavy winds from a hurricane rip the camp's tents apart or send their metal beams flying; they will die when they are left without edible food or drinkable water for long stretches in severe weather; they will die when the stagnant human waste in the unflushed toilets and the tight quarters with scores of other immigrant strangers causes disease to spread. These are not conditions that can sustain human life, let alone human rights or dignity. For Trump and his followers, that might be the point.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist